1) An upside-down Volkswagen Beetle right after it got its tire snagged by a soft shoulder and flipped. It was still spinning like a scene from a Herbie the Love Bug movie.2) A T-shirt for the Mogodore Wildcats football team. It was on the guard rail right by where traffic snarled up on I-99 near Palm Springs, FL. After a week of seeing it every day on the way to work, I hopped out of the car and grabbed it. It was in perfectly good shape, so a quick wash and I wore that shirt for 20 years. I later made a pilgrimage to Mogodore, OH, home of the Wildcats. Beautiful town, Mogodore. I've often considered going back there to retire.3) One time, I was standing on a corner in Winslow, AZ. My Lord, I must have looked pretty strange because this girl in a flatbed Ford slowed down to take a look at me.

tillerman35:Walker: Sybarite: It's not at all uncommon, but I'm always puzzled by where that one shoe comes from, especially when it still appears to be in pretty good shape.

Passenger side person has one foot hanging out window while they are sleeping and the shoe falls off. Not noticed until they wake up and the driver isn't going all the way back 100 miles to get it.

Too many instances of solitary roadside footware for this to be the explanation. Also, SRF appears in all seasons. I've often seen SRF on top of snow.

The other frequent guess is "accidents, and the EMT cut the shoe of the victim's foot for some medical reason." But the shoes are usually intact, and there is rarely another indication of an accident nearby or another location that the shoe could have rolled from.

I once rounded a curve near on Rt 18 by Rutgers and came upon a bizarre sight: the entire road was strewn with shoes. Whoever was in charge of randomly distributing shoes across all the roads in America must have hit a bump and his stock of SRF fodder bounced off the back of his truck.

I have also seen a road strewn with shoes for about a quarter mile down here in Texas...

Another one of great ideas was called Freeway Fisherman. It was basically a fishing pole with a mechanical grabber hook. A passenger would spot an oncoming object and then decide at 70mph whether to drag for it or not. My commercial ideas always get hung up on liability problems.

Ned Stark:TheLastFrontiersman: A live Indian. Thought it was a dead body, and went back to investigate (middle of the night, 10 miles outside of Pocatello, ID), and he was alive and tripping. His cousin Wilfred was nearby, crawling around a field on his hands and knees.

A chair. It was wooden, high-backed and had leather restraints on the armrests and on the back for the sitter's head and torso. It looked like an old-fashioned electric chair but without any attached wiring. I guess it was some kind of restraint chair. Looked like something you'd see if the Addams family had a garage sale. And there it sat, right in front of a perfectly normal middle-class-type suburban house.

Most recent one was on the on-ramp to a freeway and there were a couple of lawn chairs with one of them occupied by a guy in overalls holding I assume a beer. For the following week and a half the chairs remained in various positions until someone picked them up. Where I live there're a bunch of suburbanites mixed in with a bunch of rednecks.

1. Plenty of abandoned cars due to 3" of snow in Tulsa, OK. One hundred miles from the nearest hill.

2. One SUV with a tree growing out of the back seat. No blood, despite the fact that there isn't a chance that anyone could survive in any of the passenger seats (who carries a passenger in rush hour). Had previous thought "wrapped around a tree" was just and expression and that SUVs were fairly sturdy.

In the early 80's near Lakehurst NJ, there was a painting company van flipped on its roof in a ditch. A large swash of silver paint on the road and shoulder and two guys head to toe silver standing in front of the flipped over van...they looked like two tinmen from the wizard of oz.

/chuckled for years every time I passed that spot and saw the remnants of the stain.

A friend of mine and I found a loveseat in the road on US 19 in Clearwater. Figuring it was going to cause an accident, we pulled over and dragged it out of the road. We thought it would be funny just to sit there on it a while and watch traffic go by. Sure enough, a pickup truck comes along with the matching chair in the back. The loveseat had fallen out, and it took them 20 minutes to find a place to turn around and come back for it. For us, finding a loveseat wasn't that weird. For them, finding their loveseat on the side of the road with two goofballs sitting in it waving at them must have been really weird.

Same friend and I found an ancient television outside of Oatman, AZ. That wasn't weird. The weird part was that there was also a couch set up in front of it and other various pieces of living room furniture. Not just jumbled in a pile, but set up like a living room just hangin' out by the side of the highway in the desert.

One time I was speeding down the highway when splashes of color from the roadside caught my eye. I glanced right, where the road was running parallel with a tree-covered incline, on which sat, in several orderly rows, an array of stuffed animals of all sizes and colors, all facing the highway. I obviously didn't have time to gawk because crashing is bad. To this day I wish I'd gone back to have a second look, though. Man that was weird. It's not like it was right near a school or anything, at least nothing that was visible. It was just, you know, your average roadside by a New England highway. Trees, trees, trees, horde of stuffed animals watching the road, trees.